Saving the World, One Trip Through Space at a Time
by fishfingersandcustardplease
Summary: Doctor Who fanfic. No cussing, no adult content, but do good stories really need those things? I don't think so, and I think you'll feel the same way if you read my fanfic.
1. Chapter 1

**The Doctor's Companion**

**Prologue**

I had always believed in miracles, in truly magical moments without the proper words to explain them. I had always believed in the unseen, in people and places that others doubted simply because they had never laid eyes on them. I had always known that there was something out there for me, but I had never really known what it was, only that as soon as the opportunity came up, I would be a fool to waste it.

And when that day came, I didn't waste my opportunity. I ran after it.

Literally. |

**Chapter one**

"Shaina Applewhite, come up to the board and work out question fifteen for us." Mr. Huffington is one of the rudest, most arrogant and definitely most sarcastic people I have ever met. I'm not even kidding; whenever he talks, I just have this urge to throw something at him. He does his best to get on my nerves, and he enjoys every second of making me miserable.

I got up out of my seat and headed up to the front of the classroom. Grabbing the marker, I stood there for a few seconds and stared at my paper. I had answered the question, now I was trying to find out where to start.

"Ms. Applewhite, we don't have all the time in the world," my geometry teacher reminded me.

"I'm not sure if it's right," I explained.

"Well, a blank board is definitely not right, so go on."

So I started writing. I confused myself more and more every time I tried to show how I had gotten my answer. When I was done, Mr. Huffington tore my answer apart. Literally. He erased parts, drew lines through some things and moved different parts around with arrows.

"Does that make sense?" He turned to me, eyebrows raised.

I blinked a few times. "Uhm… no."

Mr. Huffington went on and on. After a while, I stopped trying to listen. Obviously I wasn't going to understand; when had I ever understood anything he was saying? The only thing I think I ever understand that year was, "Pack up now, it's about time to change classes."

Oh, those sweet words.

I wasn't the only person who was lost. Surveying my classmates, the glazed-over, I-have-no-idea-what-you're-talking-about look was written all over everyone's faces. Some people fell asleep. Others began to doodle. I saw a pair of girls in the back listening to music with their headphones threaded through their hoodies. A pack of guys started passing notes to each other and throwing crumbled pieces of paper at the back of each other's heads while Mr. Huffington wrote on the board.

After almost an hour, I thought my head was going to explode. I raised my hand. "Mr. Huffington, can I go to the restroom?"

"Go on ahead." He went back to the teaching.

I hurried out the door. Honestly, I didn't really need to use the toilet, I just had to get out of there. I can't sit still for long, especially not if Mr. Huffington is at the front of the classroom lecturing about who-knows-what.

As I was stepping into the restroom, movement caught my eye. I just saw the edge of a dark loafer and black slack pants disappearing around the corner. And for some reason, even though just that little glance hadn't struck me as odd, the urge to follow whoever was running down the hallway had overwhelmed me. Still to this day I believe that the feeling was just as much supernatural as it was my own human curiosity.

But despite the origin of the feeling, I ran after the person anyway.

I could still hear their footsteps, but I couldn't see the figure in front of me at first. I kept going, though, unearthly inquisitiveness fueling me. I went around a bend. The hallway was silent now, so I stopped to look around.

That's when I saw it.

The creature obviously wasn't the thing I had been trying to pursue, as the clothes I'd seen before were absent. But there it stood in front of me. My blood ran cold, and terror welled inside of me. Its head was that of a human's, but it was skinless and hairless like a skeleton, with empty black pits for eyes. The body was that of a large brown spider with eight very thin, long legs.

I was too horrified to let out a scream. The human-spider was only a few yards from me, and I knew that if he attacked, I had no chance of fighting him.

Out of the blue, I felt hands on my shoulders, pushing me down. "Don't move," an unfamiliar man's voice whispered in my ear, his British accent letting me know for certain he wasn't from around here, "it's blind, but its sense of smell is incredible and it can sense movement very well."

I did as I was told. The man's body was shielding me from the thing, but I knew even he couldn't stop it from hurting us.

Or I thought I knew.

The man slowly leaned up. I saw him pull something from his belt. It was long, silver on both ends and bronze in the middle, with a black concaved area where his fingers wrapped around it. The end pointing outward was shining green. It was a strange contraption, like nothing I had ever seen.

The human-spider clicked angrily. "Do you think you're little glowing stick scares me, Time Lord?" His voice was raspy, making my whole body tense up.

The British man laughed. "You would be a fool for it not to."

"I am a fool, you say?" The creature's laugh was bone-chilling. "This does not mean much coming from the Time Lord whose love for humanity has been his mortal flaw from the start."

Their conversation was making absolutely no sense to me. I curled my hands into fists against the cool tile floor, wondering how in the world I had ended up here.

British-man's 'little glowing stick' started to glow brighter. The green light shot out of the end, slamming right into the spider-human, who had been too slow and big to dodge it. At first, it looked as though it had done nothing but shine light onto him. The spider-human cackled. But then the beam widened until it was covering his whole body. The beast stood stone still, illuminated by the green light for a moment, and then a large white flash overwhelmed my eyes. There was a sickening _pop!_ sound, and the hallway filled with smoke. When it cleared a few seconds later, it was apparent that the spider-human was gone.

The British-man stood up, pulling me to my feet.

"Uhm…. thank you, I guess," I said after a moment.

"Not a problem," he replied.

"So." I swallowed. "What now?"

"Well, I've got an awful lot of running to do." He tipped his head and then started off.

I didn't even flinch. I quickly followed after him without much of a thought. We ran down the hall and out the double doors into the sunlight. In front of us stood what looked like an old blue telephone booth, except all the doors were wooden with only little windows on the top half of them. The words POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX around the top, where there was fastened what looked like a light, although it wasn't on. It was strange, an especially bizarre sight standing right outside of my middle-of-nowhere school.

But the he didn't hesitate to open the door and go inside, so I did the next best thing.

I followed him. |

The rest after that is a bit blurry. I'm not really sure what happened. All I can remember is suddenly feeling extremely weak and falling to the ground, blacking out before I even hit the ground.

When I opened my eyes, I was very disoriented. I was lying on a chair covered in a blanket in a room I had never seen before. I couldn't remember how or why I was there, only that I wasn't in school anymore. I sat there for a few moments, weighing the options of getting up and wandering or waiting for someone to show up. I finally decided for the former. Throwing off the blanket, I stood up and walked toward the entrance to the room. Light from the end of the hallway drew my attention. I headed down that way and stepped into the room. The sight made me gasp.

The ceiling was high and the sides were curved, making the room appear airy and bigger. The orangey-gold light made everything seem a bit eerie. There were holes in practically everything, although it seemed to be designed that way: the walls, the floor, the support beams. In the center of the room was a slightly elevated glass platform with multiple staircases leading up to it from what looked like other hallways. In the center of this platform was a glass tube filled with shining bluish globe that reminded me of a lava lamp, surrounded by a panel covered in buttons and knobs and other peculiar-looking control devices. There was a chair on one side of this contraption, a keyboard sticking out of the other. The tube was fed into what looked like a huge steel spiral, which reminded me of the old air-conditioning vents in my school.

All in all, this odd sight was both weird and wonderful, still to this day literally one of coolest things I have ever laid eyes on. I wandered around, getting a closer look at some of the details. I reached out my hand to place it on the tube when out of nowhere came a voice: "Curiosity killed the cat, you know."

I jumped back, startled. It was the voice of the British man I had heard before, and instantly I remembered all the events leading up to my being here. "But wait, wasn't this just a box thing?" I wondered aloud.

"Just a box thing?" The man shook his head. "Oh no, this is the TARDIS."

"The what?"

"The TARDIS. Time and relative dimension in space."

I stared at him like he was crazy, because I was thinking that maybe he was. Then again, I was seeing all of this, so maybe I was the lunatic.

"It's bigger on the inside, as you can see," he continued, "It's just disguised as a police telephone box from 1963."

"What is it actually?"

"A time machine, per say."

"Excuse me?" I gave him a look. "You're telling me we're inside of a time machine?"

"Not just any time machine, no. We're inside the TARDIS, the last one left."

"So there are others?"

He looked down at the floor, his eyes suddenly filled with an overwhelming sadness that made me want to cry just looking at him. "There _were_ others."

I cocked my head. For the first time, I actually gave this man a good look. He was tall, about four or five inches taller than me, and rather good-looking. He seemed to be in his late twenty's. The British man had longish light brown hair that fell into his face, causing him to have to flick it away often. His eyes were chocolate brown and full of knowledge, life-changing experiences and, of course, that grief I had seen before. He was wearing those same shoes and pants I remembered seeing before, as well as a tan dress shirt, corduroy sports jacket and red bow tie. When he moved, I noticed the suspenders holding up his slacks and what looked like a watch on his wrist, although I didn't catch sight of the face.

"What's your name?" I asked him.

"My name?" He appeared taken aback for a moment, but then his face resumed his previously casual expression.

"Yeah."

"Why, I'm the Doctor."

"Doctor who?"

A strange smile spread over his lips. "Exactly."

I had no idea what that meant. "You're crazy, aren't you?"

"Crazy?" The Doctor seemed to ponder this for a minute. "Well, I've been told many times I'm a madman, so I suppose I am."

"Then how did you get here, if you're crazy? Don't they lock up crazy people?"

He chuckled. "They're trying to lock me up, some of them."

"So you've escaped?"

The sorrow increased, and then sank back. He merely nodded. "Alright, you've asked enough questions. Now I have some questions for you."

"Okay." I crossed my arms.

"What's _your_ name?"

"Shaina Applewhite."

"You're American, aren't you?"

"Yeah, and you're British, aren't you?"

"I'm Gallifreyan, actually, but that's a long story." The Doctor paused for a breath. "How old are you?"

"I'm sixteen," I explained.

"And why did you follow me?"

This question caught me by surprise. "What?"

He repeated himself.

I chewed on my lip for a second. "I don't know."

The Doctor nodded his head. "So have you seen other Araneviro, or was that the first one anyone has seen around here?"

"What?" I asked, puzzled.

"Araneviro. That is the name for the beast you saw in your school. It is a half-human, half-spider formed when an Arane consumes a human, using the mortal's life force to recreate itself."

"What's an Arane, some species of freakishly large spider?"

"Something like that." When I raised my eyebrow, he went on. "Arane are an extraterrestrial race that presides on the planet Ara, right ahead of Arkheon, a bit farther from the Crab Nebula but just ahead of the Pleiades."

I was sure he was speaking another language, and he had to have been, since I literally had no idea what he was saying.

"In basic terms, Arane are not something you want to mess with. They don't have a taste for Time Lords, but it will consume any human being it sees-"

"So wait, so you're saying you're not a human being?" I stepped toward him. "What are you, then? What's a Time Lord?"

"All these questions," The Doctor replied, "If I answered everything you asked me, your head would explode."

"Just because I'm sixteen doesn't mean I'm six," I replied, irritated, "I do understand most things."

"It's not your age I'm talking about, it is literally your capacity to pertain this knowledge. Because you're a human, not to mention such a young one, you're unable to comprehend the entire truth about the universe."

"Then how come you know 'the entire truth'?" I wondered, putting air quotes around the last three words.

"Because I'm a thousand-year-old Time Lord-"

My eyes popped. "A thousand years old? You _are_ crazy! You barely look a day over twenty-five!"

"Twenty-five? Oh, dear, I haven't been twenty-five for hundreds of years." The Doctor looked almost insulted by this, although I couldn't tell why.

I suddenly realized something. I had a feeling, sort of like how you feel on an airplane, but much smoother and quieter. I leaned down to touch the floor.

The Doctor raised his eyebrows. "Now you're acting a bit mad yourself."

"We're moving." I craned my neck to look up at him, my mouth falling open. "We're moving!"

"Well yeah. Did you think a time machine was just going to sit there and do nothing?"

I got back on my feet. "Where are you taking me?" And as soon as the words came out of my mouth, I felt the movement slow and then abruptly stop, as if we were landing. We had fallen onto something solid.

"Why don't you find out for yourself?" the Doctor said, indicating the door.

I blinked, calculating his response. Was he kidding, trying to trick me, or legitimately being serious? I wasn't sure if his 'serious' was even real, as insane as he seemed.

"Go on." He pressed his lips together in a tiny grin. "Do you really think that I would send you into a trap?"

Taking a deep breath, I went over to the door. I grabbed the handle and cautiously opened the door. A light breeze hit my face.

The sky was purple. Literally, it was a bright purple dotted with what looked like little golden stars. The ground below the TARDIS was grassy and clear. It was rather foggy, making the sight distance only about a mile in every direction. But I could see the back of a building in the distance. It was made entirely of sleek blacked-out glass covered by huge amounts of some sort of white material.

"What is that?" I asked, pointing.

"What does it look like?" the Doctor replied.

I squinted hard. Upon further inspection, I realized something that made the memory of the spider-human creature- Arane, I reminded myself- creep back into my head.

The building was built in the middle of a ginormous, thick spider web.

Without noticing it, I had gripped the Doctor's arm in fear. I let go immediately, stepping away from him. "Where are we?"

He stretched out his arms, but there wasn't much of a smile on his face. "Welcome to Ara, home of the Arane and the Araneviro."

I'd figured it out, but a freaked out "What?!" still escaped my lips. "If you think that I'm stepping onto this planet full of humongous spider things that like eating humans like me for breakfast, you're wrong."

"Am I?" He indicated the ground below our feet.

I literally screamed. We were now standing outside the TARDIS on the Araian ground. The doors of the time machine were closed. "What is a matter with you? Do you _want_ me to die today?"

He patted me softly on the arm. "Calm down, you're not going to die. Don't you remember what happened last time we were attacked by an Araneviro?"

I glanced at his pocket. "That… that glowy thing."

The Doctor reached into his jacket and pulled it out. "This is called a sonic screwdriver."

"What does it do?"

"Basically anything you want it to."

"But will it kill all of them? There must be more, if they can make that huge thing."

The Doctor patted my shoulder. "Don't be so frightened. Stick close to me, however." He started forward. I stayed behind, not moving, and after a moment, he turned around to look at me. "Aren't you coming?"

"Why should I trust you?" I asked, trying to suppress the fear welling inside of me.

He smiled, and it was dazzling, the impossible grin of a madman. "Because I'm the Doctor, of course."|


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter two

There were Arane everywhere. These were basically like the huge spiders from the Harry Potter movies. My only problem? I didn't have a magic wand or a flying car, just a peculiar man with a sonic screwdriver.

Basically, the whole way over to the large web-building, I was hoping that I wouldn't become spider bait.

The Doctor seemed totally unafraid as we walked through the almost-dark. It smelled like a mixture of freshly turned soil and blood, the smell sickening my stomach. I stayed right behind the Doctor as I'd been told. We walked up to an entrance and very cautiously looked inside it. The huge structure was packed with Arane, of course.

"I'm not going in there," I whispered.

"I'm not going in there, either," the Doctor agreed, "We're going over there." He pointed to my left, and for a moment I saw nothing but whitish fog. But after squinting for a few seconds, I made out the shape of another building. This one was quite similar to the one were currently standing outside, except it seemed to be sticking out of the ground, as if there were more of it underneath the soil.

We started running. The Doctor led me around the back side of the smaller structure. He then stopped in front of a short door with a wide length, the first marking I had seen at all on the building. A sign written in some language that looked like three-year-old scribbles covered the entire thing, and that's when I saw the control pad on the side of the door. When I pulled on the handle, it was firmly locked.

The control pad was no match for the Doctor, as I was beginning to learn nothing really was. In a matter of moments, he had taken off the cover, fiddled with some wires and managed to unlock the door. Once inside, the Doctor reconnected the wires from the control pad on the interior doors.

"Like we were never here," he told me with a grin.

The cost was clear; the hallway was completely vacant of anything, doors, windows and especially Arane. We headed off. The little structure was formed like a maze. The passageways were winding, and some even completely dead-ended. But we zoomed through it, as the Doctor seemed to be following something that I had no notice of. The building had so far been completely desolate. I could just feel us getting farther and farther underground.

All of a sudden, I felt the Doctor grabbing my arm. "Don't move," he warned. I froze, and in a moment understood why. There was a red laser pointing at the center of my forehead. Usually, in any kind of action movie, that meant trouble. I figured the same was said for then, so I held still until the Doctor, with a pair of trusty electrical wire cutters, managed to disable whatever was trying to blow my brains out. The weapon sparked angrily.

"They've set this place up with lots of defenses, more than you know about," the Doctor muttered under his breath, "That means something really important must be hidden somewhere in here." He took off once again.

Finally, after what must have been at least fifteen minutes, we made it to a large set of double doors in the same short and squat Araian style. This time the lock was a slab of metal with a keypad sitting in the center. The Doctor didn't even flinch. He typed in a code so long there was no way I could have caught any of the numbers, but with success. The mechanics whirred and the door unbolted, sliding open.

We were hit by a cool breeze that held that recognizable smell of technology. I could see why as soon as we had stepped into the room. It was about the size of a gymnasium, with blank brown walls and a black tile floor. Nothing occupied the room save for one very big machine sitting in the middle of the room. It mostly consisted of the enclosed glass section in the center of it, with two double doors whose design reminded me of the TARDIS. Actually, the whole machine reminded of the little blue box, except on a much larger, wider scale, and it was completely glass.

Sort of the TARDIS, but Arane-style.

"This can't be," the Doctor gasped.

"Is that a TARDIS?" I wondered. "But I thought you said yours was the last one."

"It is. They must have… made it somehow." The Doctor circled around the machine, studying it closely. He opened up the doors and we peered inside. The Arane-TARDIS even looked like the inside of the Doctor's TARDIS, except it was only a yard wide on each side. Still, the resemblance was unsettling. "Remarkable."

Suddenly, a siren began to blare. The lighting in the room turned completely red, and the sound of bolts sliding into place filled our ears.

"They've discovered our location!" The Doctor snapped into action. He fumbled around for something inside his jacket. I could hear the sound of spider legs scratching at the ceiling over our heads, as if they were hurrying around on a floor above us. Finally, the Doctor pulled out a wrench. He shoved it into my hand. "When I say so, loosen that connector, do you hear me?"

I fashioned the wrench's mouth around the indicated connector holding one of the tubes in place. I've never been good with this like this, as I barely passed shop class in middle school, but I figured the Doctor knew more than I did, so I might as well try.

He got to work on the machine's control panel, turning dials and pulling levers. The Arane-TARDIS was just heating up when the doors all around us sprang open. Hoards of Arane flooded into the room.

My skin crawled at the sight. "Doctor!"

He had not even looked up from his work, but once he caught sight of them coming toward us, his pace increased. The Doctor tried to yank up a lever, but it seemed to be stuck in the middle. Gritting his teeth, he leaned all his weight into it.

"I smell a Time Lord," I heard a scratchy voice say from behind us.

"Time Lord!" the other spiders agreed. "Destroy the Time Lord!"

Inch by inch, the lever finally reached its endpoint. "Now!" The Doctor shouted. I found turning the connector was about as difficult as pulling the lever had seemed. It seemed as though it were cemented in place, and I was fighting a battle I was destined to lose. But when a quick glance behind me showed that the Arane were too close for comfort, I turned it harder. The Doctor was holding two tubes together that were trying to repel each other like poles of the same charge on two magnets.

"I smell a human," another Arane cackled, "I smell lunch."

Mingled shouts of "Lunch!" and "Eat the human!" split the air. The Arane were only a few yards away, ready to devour us.

At last, the connector snapped off. The tube it had been holding in place on the Arane-TARDIS started spewing something that looked oddly like the Araian sky: purple with flecks of gold. And then I realized it wasn't the tube; the room around me was crumbling before my eyes. As a matter of fact, everything was crumbling before my eyes, all changing from the machine room to the Araian sky, and then into a black void of nothing, as if I were going blind.

But then I blinked, and the world was painted before my eyes. A different picture than the one I had left, but this one was much more reassuring. We were back inside the TARDIS. I could feel the time machine moving under my feet. The Doctor was sitting in the chair at the control panel.

As soon as I caught my breath, I crossed my arms. "What just happened? How'd we get back here?"

"That didn't go as planned," the Doctor said as if I had not spoken.

"Hello?!" My head was spinning.

"Calm down. There's no need for shouting."

My mouth fell open. "Those things are vicious, and they're on Earth! They're gonna eat everybody! Those spider things-"

"Shaina." The Doctor was so calm that it annoyed me.

For a second I stood there and simply glowered at him. And then I laughed, actually laughed, because I realized how absolutely absurd the situation was. I found it hilarious that I had believed all of it. It had to just be some daydream or something. Maybe I hadn't even woken up that morning, I was still in bed.

The Doctor blinked, confused. "What are you laughing at?"

"This is a dream. It's a silly, stupid dream and I can't believe I've gotten so wrapped up in it." I shook my head. "All of this is just a projection of my mind."

He raised one eyebrow. "You really think you could come up with all this?"

"I don't know. This is just… ridiculous." He gave me a confused expression, so I continued. "A crazy British guy flying around space in a blue box taking me to a planet full of angry spiders? That's insane! I mean, what do you do, like kidnap people and force them to go to planets full of spider-monsters that want to eat them for a living?"

"If I remember correctly, you followed me."

"Touché." I took a deep breath. "This has to be a dream. But I've never been this scared of anything in a dream before." And then I had a thought, something I couldn't place, but it filled me with this feeling I couldn't explain. "But you're not scared of anything."

He turned to look at me, eyebrows raised. "Do you think so?"

Dream or no dream, I didn't want the human race to be wiped from existence by a bunch of evil spiders. "You can save us, Doctor, right? Since you said you do it all the time. You're not gonna let the Arane consume all of us, are you?"

The Doctor's eyes met mine, and I wasn't sure whether I was awake or asleep, only that for some strange reason I wanted to believe this was all real life. |

I stood behind the Doctor, peering over his shoulder as he typed things into the keyboard. This wasn't doing me much good, however, as half the time there was only infinite amounts of letter and number codes that didn't make sense to me. The other half the screen displayed pictures of odd-looking creatures and used words about planets and galaxies I had never heard of before.

All of a sudden, the TARDIS lurched violently. I was sent flying backwards, my head banging into one of the support beams. When the time machine rocked again, I slid across the floor. This time I shielded my head with my arms, so my elbows took the blunt of the hit, which didn't feel any better.

The Doctor was hanging onto the control panel. He looked surprised and a bit panicked, but not exactly afraid. He started fiddling with knobs and buttons.

"Doctor, what's happening?" I yelled when the TARDIS tilted for the third time, almost launching me off the glass platform. I managed to grab a hold of the one of the railings, but my feet were dangling and the rocking was too much for me. It was like we were inside a bouncy house during a magnitude 9.0 earthquake.

He kept messing with the panel, shaking his hair out of his eyes.

"Doctor! What's going on?"

The Time Lord turned to me and shouted, "Just hold on!" He grinned a bit as he said this last word, one of those eccentric smiles. "Geronimo!"

I screamed as the TARDIS rushed forward. The rocking was getting worse by the minute, and my grip was getting loose. The Doctor was frantically messing with the controls, typing things into the system while trying to keep a hold. I felt as if I were going to be sick.

Finally, with one last lurch that made my hands slip from the bar, the TARDIS stopped moving completely. I crashed onto the floor below, crying out.

"We've landed, I got her through!" the Doctor's voice echoed from above. Then he was silent for a moment, probably noticing that I was gone. "Shaina?"

"Down here," I groaned.

He ran down the stairs and knelt beside me. "Are you alright?"

"No, I'm not alright," I replied crossly, "I've been through enough trauma on this ship, and I demand you give me an answer instead of avoiding my question. What just happened?"

The Doctor swallowed. "There's a reason why we left Ara so quickly. It wasn't just because they were trying to eat us, either." When I didn't say anything, he continued. "The Arane have somehow gotten control of the Time Vortex. That machine that resembled the TARDIS, it was their homemade version of a time machine. It explains how they've been getting to Earth. And just now, when we fled them, they obviously didn't like it. They were trying to destroy the TARDIS."

"And you overrode it?"

He looked at the floor. "Well, this will be hard to explain."

"One of those head-exploding questions?"

The Doctor nodded. "But, if you must." He took a breath. "Time travel is not meant to be possible, nor is it natural or good for time or the people involved. I have probably time-traveled more than anyone else has ever done before, and this takes a toll on all of time, but most specifically reality, as it is being affected by every action the TARDIS takes. Therefore, whenever I travel, reality is torn."

I stared at him, mouth half-open, one eyebrow raised. "How do you tear reality? You can't touch it."

"I can't touch it and neither can you. But-" the Doctor stroked the floor- "the TARDIS, she can touch it. And every occasion when she travels through time, she tears it."

"So can it, like… rip? All the way?"

The Doctor grabbed my hands and helped me to my feet. I was sore, but nothing was broken or bleeding, only bruised. He led me back onto the glass platform. Hitting a button, he pointed to the screen. "What do you see?"

The sides looked like a coordinate grid, forming different boxes that were mapped out by decades. But between the 2010's and the 2020's, there was a jagged gap. Only one small part of the coordinate grid was together between these two decades. Between the two halves was a field of swirling of colors, ominous and dizzying.

"Uhm…" I chewed on my lip. "It _looks_ like a coordinate grid that's about to be completely split, but I know that's not the answer. It's really…" My voice trailed off. What had he just been talking about? A tear in reality. And I had asked if it was possible for reality to completely rip apart.

According to the screen, it could.

And it was about to. |


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter three

"We ripped reality." My throat felt like it was closing. "We're about to rip it apart."

"We didn't do this," he replied, although his composure was starting to crumble, "The TARDIS only travels through the Time Vortex, sometimes saving it, sometimes changing it. But she never manipulates it like this."

"So then who did?"

The Doctor leaned forward with his palms pressing into the control panel. "The Arane were not made to mess with time. The Time Vortex was not made to be messed with."

My hands were trembling.

He ran his fingers through his air, taking in a shaky breath. We stood there in silence for a long time. Finally, I couldn't take it. "What does this mean?"

The Doctor's milk-chocolate-brown eyes were staring into nothing.

"Doctor?" I wrung my hands. "What are we going to do?"

Again, he took no notice of me.

"D-Doctor?" My whole body was shaking now.

"I don't know." His voice was low, dangerous. And then he straightened up, eyes ablaze with frustration and sadness and… something else, something I had never wanted to see from that man, even in the short time I had known him.

Fear.

"I don't know," he repeated. And then again, this time shouting, "I don't know!"

I felt tears flood my eyes. I was suddenly struck with a feeling, a thought so dim-witted and yet crushing at the same time: this was not a dream, even if it did seem unreasonable. This is was real, very real, and very, very dangerous.

The TARDIS landed. It wasn't as smooth as it had been when we had been on the planet Ara. This time, both of us had to hold onto the control panel to keep our footing. Once everything had settled, both of us stood up. The Doctor led me over to the doors. Pushing one open each, we both peered out.

We had landed in the country, fields of corn surrounding us on all sides. The road was a few yards away, too far into the backwoods to even be paved. The TARDIS was covered by an enormous oak tree. I didn't see any houses or cars or people; there were no signs of life at all. But it was clearly Earth, possibly Oregon or Wyoming.

Swallowing hard, I looked up at the Doctor.

He raised his hand. "You're going to ask what we're gonna do, aren't you? Well please, spare me and yourself." And then he stopped.

"If you know what I was gonna ask, why aren't you answering it? You do have an answer, don't you?"

No reply. The Doctor just stepped out of the TARDIS. I followed, and before I could say anything, I got an answer to an earlier question of mine.

The sky was bright blue and cloudless one second, but as soon as I blinked, the sun had disappeared from the sky. Literally, the sun had vanished completely. It was pitch black all around us. I couldn't even see my hand as I reached out for the Doctor. He interlocked our arms, and I could tell he was anxious, although his fear was nothing compared to my constant feeling that I was either going to be sick or burst into tears.

The sky was filled with a blue light so bright that I had to cover my eyes. When I could open them again, I saw something falling from the sky. One, ten, one-hundred… soon there were too many to count. They looked like oversized salt shakers with a gun sticking out of the top of them and little balled strips of armor on their bottom half. Next came the Arane, so many raining down from the sky that I couldn't possibly count them. Then there were silver robots, all human-sized and complete with two eyes, a mouth and arms and legs. After that, large furry animal things that looked exactly like the description of the Sasquatch fell from the sky. Next was a group of tall creatures resembling the earlier robots, but these looked completely covered in dark grayish metal armor.

More and more came. None of them looked like anyone I wanted to deal with, and they definitely were not from Earth. I was petrified. Beside me, the Doctor gazed up at the sky with shocked and terrified disbelief. I had questions, of course (I always have questions), but I was too scared to speak.

"They've done it, haven't they?" the Doctor muttered suddenly.

"Y-you… you know the monsters?" I stammered.

"I've fought all of them before. Some of them should be erased completely, others have much smaller numbers. But when the Arane ripped reality, they changed all of that. They brought them all back. Everything I've done…" He sucked in a breath. "Undone."

Tears were threatening to fall. I was terrified, feeling helpless. How were we going to fight off all of those awful-looking beasts? They out-numbered us by thousands. We had no weapons. The only thing we did have was the TARDIS, and she was no good now that the Arane were controlling the Time Vortex. I was in way over my head. I didn't know anything about any of them, only that they were monsters and they didn't belong here. Some of them didn't even belong amongst the living.

_How is it that only an hour ago I was in class trying to stay awake_? my mind reminded me with awe. I longed to be back in that classroom, safe and sound.

"How do you repair reality?" the Doctor whispered.

My stomach tied itself into a knot.

"Or… no, that's impossible." He tapped on his lips. "But, is anything really impossible?"

I looked over at him. What was he getting at?

"Could this work? This could work, maybe. Maybe not." The Doctor slipped his arm out of the crook of mine and walked back into the TARDIS. He began typing on the keyboard again, his fingers moving at lightning speed. Then he sprinted down the hall to a library, where he yanked books off the shelves, paged through them and tossed them over his shoulder when he didn't find what he needed. I watched this all with a sick feeling. I wanted to be able to do something, but I didn't have any clue what was happening. It was up to him.

Finally, after a very long time, the Doctor spun around to face me. "It's never been done. And if it's never been done, that doesn't mean it has been ruled out. Yes, it also means it could fail miserably, but it could work. It needs to work. This is our only hope. I don't have any other plans."

"What are you saying?" My voice came out as a tattered whisper.

"I'm saying that we use the rip in reality to reverse this timeline so this becomes a time loop, meaning no one can ever come back to this reality, so reality as it was before the Arane played with it will become reality once again."

I tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. "Alright, as long as that makes sense to you."

"It must work. It must!" The Doctor ran back into the control room. "Now, where was the last little chunk of the gap? What day was it when I found you?"

"May 19th, 2013," I told him.

"Good, good." He typed that in. The TARDIS began to move, although much slower than it had previously. "We're headed for May 19th, 2013, the last piece of time before reality was torn. Once we get there, the fun begins."

"Fun?" I was afraid of what he meant by that.

The Doctor typed some more. "Because the Arane have control of the Time Vortex, they know where we're going and they will probably try to stop us. They'll come after us, all the beasts you saw falling from Earth's sky. So we will be straddled between one half of reality and the gap in the middle." He turned to look at me. "Are you getting this?"

My head was spinning. "No, but go ahead."

"Hmm. Well, what we're going to need to do is make the first half of reality the second half of reality. Not fusing them, but making them the same timeframe. I think I may be able to do this one way or another, not totally sure, but it won't be easy nor beneficial for those of us in the TARDIS."

"What does that mean?"

He proceeded on as if I had never spoken, "Your job during all of this is something I hate to ask of you, and is probably unachievable, but it needs to be done. After all, if I can attempt one unreasonable thing, who's to say we can't go for two, yeah?"

I swallowed hard. "What do you want me to do?"

The Doctor reached into his pocket and pulled out his sonic screwdriver. Placing my hand around the object, he put my finger on a button. "This will cause whatever you point it at to be incinerated. Good luck."

"G-good luck? You mean…" My eyes widened. "You're making me fight off all those alien monster things?"

"Not _all_ of them, but the ones who try to attack the TARDIS, yes."

I blanched. "I can't do that! I'm just a little human girl compared to them! They have weapons and knowledge that I don't-"

The Doctor's face was completely serious. He wrapped my fingers around his sonic screwdriver. "Two things. One, there is no such thing as just a human. You are as important as you believe yourself to be, and everyone is incredible in their own way. And two." He paused to give me a reassuring smile. "You have trusted me this far, so why stop now? There are no truly impossible things, Shaina, only things that are too difficult for us to understand."

I surprised myself by speaking, after a long pause to regain composure. "Doctor?"

"Yes?"

"If we die, I want to thank you for letting me time-travel with you. This has been the best experience of my life."

And then I turned on my heel and threw open the door of the TARDIS. |


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter four

I was not expecting the mass chaos that I found when I peered out, although I'm not sure why. Just because the TARDIS had been untouched by the monsters, that didn't mean they weren't destroying the Earth.

Which is what they were doing, literally.

The Sasquatch-looking beasts were trampling over everything in their path, flattening buildings and cars and trees. The salt-shakers were zapping people with a laser coming from the tube at the top, all of them yelling, "Exterminate!" like some sort of possessed condiment holder. Both species of robots were picking up people and either tossing them back and forth like water balloons or throwing them miles and miles away like baseballs. The Arane were eating people in three seconds flat, not even close to enough time for the innocent humans to react. Something that looked like a crazed race of mannequins were just grabbing things at random and smashing them on the ground.

People were screaming and crying, the sound so horrible that it tore at my ears. My heart broke into a million pieces. The tears that I had held back flooded over. I was fearful for them as much as I was myself. I didn't know where we were, as we seemed to be hovering over some city I'd never seen before, but these were still people.

Out of the blue- accurately, as the sky was still shining- one of the salt-shaker machine monsters started flying at me. Gasping, I held out the sonic screwdriver and shot a beam of light at the thing. It dodged it, somehow, and sent its laser flying at me. I ducked. The beam hit the floor of the glass platform. It came flying back, so I moved out of the way and watched as the salt-shaker electrocuted itself.

"One down, about a thousand more to go," I muttered as I got on my feet.

At that very moment, the Doctor spoke out of what I had thought was nowhere, "I was wondering when you two would show up." I turned around, and standing in the mouth of the nearest hallway were two people I had never seen before, but were apparently familiar and friendly with the Doctor. One was a woman with wavy reddish-brown hair and hazel eyes. The other- obviously her husband or boyfriend, as he was holding her hand- light brown hair with just a hint of blonde and green eyes. The two of them looked very confused.

"What's going on?" the man wondered. "How did we get here?"

"No time to talk now," the Doctor muttered, waving his hand at me, "Go help her. Shaina, there's an Arane behind you."

I whirled around at just the right moment to get a burst of hairy spider leg to the face. As I landed, the red-headed woman yanked the sonic screwdriver from my hand and shot a green light beam at the Arane. It disappeared before our eyes.

"Who's this, your new companion?" she asked the Doctor.

He shrugged. "I suppose, if we survive this."

The man held out a hand, helping me to my feet. "My name's Rory, this is Amy."

"I'm Shaina," I told him.

Just then, another two people appeared, this time separately, although only seconds apart. The first was a short woman with soft chestnut-colored skin and half of her short black hair pinned up. The second was another red-headed woman, this time older with a brighter hair color and light green eyes.

"Doctor?" the first woman's dark eyes lit up.

He cocked his head. "Martha, the girl you don't recognize is Shaina." His eyes landed on the other person. "Donna. You remember everything now, don't you?"

The woman looked at him through her eyelashes. "What's that supposed to mean? I thought I was brilliant."

"You are." His voice sounded a bit sad.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw three of those mannequin creatures trying to pull themselves inside the TARDIS. Rory was kicking frantically at one of them, trying to make it loose its grip, but then it grabbed his foot. Amy incinerated the closest ones to her while Martha and I yanked Rory away from the last one. Donna kicked it right in the face, and the monster vanished from sight.

"We can't fight all the monsters with just this one," I said, "Are there any more of these sonic screwdriver things, Doctor?"

Amidst his business of typing and pulling levers and things, the Doctor chuckled under his breath. "No, there's only one. But I suppose there are weapons stashed somewhere around here."

"We'll go look, you three stay here," Martha ordered. She drug Donna behind her as she ran down one of the hallways.

More people started appearing. I was introduced to them as soon as we had a moment of spare time to talk, and then they were joining the fight against the beasts that kept attacking the TARDIS. Jack was a middle-aged guy with blue-grey eyes and a butt-chin; Sarah-Jane was a woman about fiftyish with mousy brown hair and blue eyes; Canton looked like a businessman, with short brown hair and eyes to match.

Rose was special, or she had to be, because the Doctor just stood there staring at her for a moment when she appeared. He even stopped what he was doing to go and hug her.

River was distinctive as well. She came up behind him, but before she could even touch him, he had turned around and embraced her as well.

I faintly wondered if the Doctor was torn between these two women, and then I decided it wasn't my business.

Anyway, I probably wouldn't have understood.

"So what's going on exactly, how did we get here?" River asked.

"There was a tear in reality-" I began to say.

"But it's there always some kind of rip?" Martha butted in.

"When you time-travel, you tear reality," Donna seemed to be explaining.

"I know, I've been told. But this is different. The TARDIS didn't do it, the Arane did. And they didn't just contribute to the tearing, they ripped it apart entirely."

The questions came like open fire, and I wasn't prepared for it. "So reality's torn completely?" , "Who are the Arane?" , "Is that why we're back?", things like that. I had just opened my mouth to speak when all of a sudden I saw something across the room. Turning my head, I caught sight of a statue. It was that of an angel, bent over with her hands covering her eyes, as if she were crying. The statue looked like something a person could find in a graveyard among the tombstones. "What is that?"

Everyone's heads snapped in that direction. Almost immediately, a shout of "Don't blink!" split the air.

"Why can't we blink?" I asked, making sure not to look away.

"It's a Weeping Angel," Amy explained, eyes locked on the creature, "As long as someone is looking at it, she won't move. But once you blink, the Angel will attack."

"Who's looking the other way?" Canton asked suddenly.

I felt the arms of the people next to me pulling me down as a beam of blue light shot across the TARDIS. The Doctor ducked just in time to avoid being hit, instantly going back to his work. River pulled out something that greatly resembled the Doctor's sonic screwdriver and blew the salt shaker monster to pieces.

"Is that-" Rose wondered, but River cut her off.

"It's a sonic screwdriver just like the Doctor's," the woman snapped, "but from a different generation."

We were soon fighting too much to speak. Martha and Donna had retrieved a few guns, three pieces of heavy steel, some sort of small rifle-looking things that shot red lasers and a bag of grenade-type bombs that exploded whenever they hit something hard. The amount of monsters attacking got worse every time I turned around, and even though there were eleven of us fighting, two of us were totally stopped to stare at the growing population of Weeping Angels. The statues were getting closer by the minute. Some had shifted position, either moving their hands away from their eyes or baring their sharp teeth and clawing up their stone fingers.

The salt-shakers were called Daleks, the Sasquatches were Yeti, the mannequins were Autons, the shinier robots were Cybermen, the darker robots were Ice Warriors, not mention the Weeping Angels…

…and then there were The Silence.

These monsters were by far the worst of all of them. When seen, they appeared liked suited aliens with very large heads covered in sickly greyish skin that somewhat resembled human skulls without noses. But as soon as you looked away from The Silence, they slipped your mind. Literally. You totally forgot you had seen them at all.

"There's a- wait, what was I going on about?" I found myself saying. Finally, Amy tossed me a black marker, her eyes trained on one.

"What's this for?" I asked.

"Whenever you see one of The Silence, mark a line on your skin somewhere," she told me. "We need to have some way of knowing they're here, otherwise we can't fight them." So every time my eyes found one of The Silence, I slashed a quick black tally mark on my arms.

All of us had our fair share of injuries, but Sarah-Jane was the first of us to experience the biggest loss of all: her life. She had backed up while fighting an Ice Warrior and found herself transported out of thin air by the Weeping Angel behind her. Then Canton was 'exterminated' by a Dalek. After that, Donna, battling a Yeti, had her neck snapped by one of the hairy beasts. She crumbled into a ball on the floor of the TARDIS, unmoving.

My head was spinning. If a reality gap becoming a reality tear had been difficult to understand, this was beyond comprehension. Not only were we fighting seven species of malevolent aliens, people who were apparently supposed to be long gone or brain dead had appeared out of thin air with no idea how they had shown up here.

Not only that, but it was tiring. No, more like exhausting. I had a long chunk of steel that I could use to block shots from the Daleks or smash apart the closest Auton who wasn't paying attention, but it was wearing on me.

And deep down inside of me was this awful feeling that it was never going to end, that we were just going to fight until we all fell out. |


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter five

"Jack, I need you over here," the Doctor called, "Quickly please!"

The man dropped his weapon and ran over. "What do you need?"

He took Jack's hand, palm up. "I'm sorry," was all he said. He shoved a tube into the skin of the man's hand, causing him to flinch. "You remember everything about your travels with me, don't you?"

Jack nodded his head. "What are you doing?"

"You're only an echoed entity here. Once I fix the reality gap, you will go back to the parallel world again." The Doctor fiddled with the control panel. "I'm sorry if this kills you, Jack, but it must be done."

"Whoa, whoa, hang on," Martha butted in, "You're _killing_ Jack?"

The Time Lord waved his hand. "You're all just projections; Shaina and I are the only ones outside the scope of the reality gap, since we were in the TARDIS when it was created." His eyes found mine. "That means you can't die. You don't get taken back to where I found you if you're killed, you're just… dead."

"What are you doing to me?" Jack asked, appearing uncomfortable.

"I need the coordinates of your memories. But since you're technically in another universe, not to mention they are from ages ago, I doubt this process will go well for your brain."

As soon as the Doctor hit a button on his control pad, Jack immediately began to writhe. The TARDIS was moving, the air blowing so fast it felt like the wind was yanking at my hair. Rose shut the doors.

"Where are we going?" Amy wondered.

Suddenly, the TARDIS rocked violently, sending us all to our feet.

"Are we being attacked?" Rory asked.

"Probably, but that's not the problem." River was standing beside the Doctor now, her eyes scanning the screen. "What is that point flashing for?"

"That's our destination," the Doctor explained calmly.

She gasped. "We can't go there."

"We have no other choice, River."

Rose, curious, had wandered over. "Where are we going, Doctor?"

He turned and looked at her. "All of this started a long time ago. The Arane have been working on the reality gap for longer than I thought; they have some plan to destroy the Earth. But the problem is, they didn't know that all of this will be only a fabrication of imagination once reality is repaired."

She gave him a blank look. "Okay. So what are you saying?"

"Imagination, Rose. Where do you find imagination?"

"Inside your head, of course." Rose's hands flew to her mouth. "Oh, Doctor, you're not saying…" Her voice trailed off.

He bobbed his head. "We're going inside Jack's brain."

There was a beat of silence. I don't think any of us knew what to say. I mean, how in the world were we going to travel into someone's brain? The idea was ludicrous, but then again, this was the Doctor's plan.

"What are we going there for? And how can we?" Martha appeared frantic. "What memory do you need?"

"Only one. You were there, Martha." The Doctor's gaze was still on Rose. The volume of his voice dropped. "And you, Rose."

She looked up at him, lips parted, but said nothing.

The TARDIS was moving at a faster pace, I could tell from the movement of the air around us. It was also shaking like we were inside a bag of popcorn that had been placed in the microwave on a setting much higher than needed. We were all holding on for dear life, although I was the only person whose heart was really in it now that the rest of them knew they would technically still live if they 'died'.

The Doctor was gazing at Martha and Rose, who were sharing a look of confusion. River looked ready to kill one or both of them when suddenly they both turned on him, mouths hanging open in shock. "The reality bomb."

And before anyone could say anything else, the TARDIS lurched so badly that we all hit the floor. We were sent spiraling through the air, Jack's pained screaming the soundtrack to our crazy adventure.|

We were inside a memory, so the Doctor had explained that no one could see us. He also explained that if we disrupted the process of anything, changing the way the prophecy had worked itself out, all of us would be destroyed.

Jack's memory was of something happening on a ship called the Crucible. It was apparently a Dalek ship, holding the entire population of the Daleks, as well as Rose, Martha, Jack, Sarah-Jane, a man named Mickey, a woman named Jackie. There was another man there, one with spiky brown hair and bright brown eyes, who they told me was the Doctor in his tenth regeneration, as opposed to the eleventh regeneration form he was in now.

"So he doesn't die, he just changes appearance?" I wondered.

"He's a Time Lord, darling," River told me, "all Time Lords regenerate."

I shook my head, deciding to not ponder on that.

We were in the basement floor, watching. Some sort of creature that resembled a human but with tough, brownish-orange skin and black webbing over his eyes was sitting in the bottom half of a Dalek. I was told this was Davros. The other odd-looking creature, this one reminding me of a jellyfish made of pinkish skin with a brain on top and two yellow eyes, was Dalek Caan.

"Are we going to steal the reality bomb?" Martha wondered. "Wouldn't that disrupt the prophecy, though?"

"We're not stealing it, but we're going to use the radiation it gives off," the Doctor told her, "Then we will harness that power and release it against the Arane, not only turning all of them into nothing but atoms, but destroying the technology they're using to manipulate the Time Vortex."

River appeared to be the only person who had comprehended any of that. But I'd learned by then that it was easier to nod and see what little easy thing I could do to help when the Doctor said something that went over my head.

Davros was laughing evilly, his nasty black teeth shining under the lights. "Ahahaha! Nothing can stop the detonation, nothing!"

But not a second later, the sound of the TARDIS filled the room, and it slowly came into view. Out ran… the Doctor?

"Human biological meta-crisis," River whispered before I could ask.

Davros shot down both the Meta-Crisis Doctor and Donna, who had also run out of the TARDIS from the past. He had also destroyed the weapon they had tried to use against him. Davros turned on a projection screen out of thin air, and the sound of a Dalek counting down began. Right as it hit one, the Doctor of now twisted a button. The entire console, plus the tube, glowed a bright orange. Jack began to yell. We were moving again, this time much slower, as if we were towing something behind us.

"Amy, open the doors again," the Doctor instructed, "The Arane know what we're doing and they don't like it."

As soon as the red-headed woman pushed open the doors of the TARDIS, the Arane attack began. They came out of everywhere, Arane and Araneviro alike. Amy was zapping as fast as she possibly could, Rory whacking over the head the beasts who avoided her flying lasers. River had her sonic screwdriver out as well. The rest of us were shooting them with the guns or beating them with steel as best we could.

An Arane made to jump on me, but I shot it with my gun. Not a moment later, another one was coming after me. Their numbers seemed to multiply every time I blinked. And then, with a scary realization, I whirled around just in time to see Rory disappear, touched by one of the Weeping Angels.

"Rory!" his wife cried.

"Amy, behind you!" Just as Rose said this, Amy turned and stared at the Weeping Angel. It froze into stone, hands outstretched and mouth wide with ferocity.

Martha pulled me by the sleeve. I jumped with her, narrowly avoiding a bite from an Araneviro. There were more of the huge spiders in the TARDIS than companions, and our numbers were dwindling fast. The Weeping Angels were taking advantage of our distractions and creeping closer.

I kept my eyes on a group of the statues as I tried to fend off an Arane. This strategy surprised me by actually working.

That is, until I was bitten.

The Araneviro's teeth sank into the tender flesh of my shoulder, right above my collarbone. I screamed, pulling myself away from it. River shot it down with one fell swoop, the spider disappearing in a puff of smoke.

"Are you alright?" Rose asked. She pushed my hair away from my shoulder and gently turned my body so I was in the light. She sucked in a startled breath.

My skin was literally sizzling. The bite mark looked exactly like it would if I had been bitten by any regular human, but the edges were tinted a sickening blackish color. My blood was steaming, and it was burning like I was lying in a fire.

"Ow!" Rose exclaimed. When she turned her arm around, she had a similar bite.

"The Araneviro are venomous, their poison will kill you!" River told us.

We kept fighting, anyway. My eyes were filling with tears because the pain was so bad. I had to blink several times before my vision would clear. The Arane and the Araneviro just kept coming. Soon, all of us had been bitten at least once.

Their images were fading. Rose, the first of them to be bitten, was soon so washed-out I could barely see her. Whenever she attacked, there was a time lapse of about ten seconds before whatever she was fighting was hit. And then, with one last, "I'm sorry!", Rose disappeared completely.

"Amy, throw me the screwdriver!" the Doctor called. She picked up the steel that had fallen out of Rory's hands before he had been touched by the Weeping Angel and tossed the sonic screwdriver over to him. He pointed it at River. "Sonic me!"

River aimed and shot at his sonic screwdriver. The beam went from the end of hers into the end of his. The Doctor was about to do something with it, but then he shouted, "Look out!"

Too late. I felt the Araneviro's teeth on my leg before I could even flinch. At the same time, River shrieked as the Weeping Angel touched her back and she vanished. Amy tried to swing the steel at the Arane trying to eat her, but the time lapse between her and the creature was too much. She disappeared into thin air as well.

The Arane and Araneviro pressed in around me until I could barely see any light between them. I squeezed my eyes shut, unable to move. My leg, shoulder and stomach- the three places I had been bitten- were sizzling. I was bleeding from my head and my arm. My muscles were so tired and hot that I was covered in sweat. I was soon unable to stop myself from thrashing about, as I was filled with so much venom from the Araneviro biting me all around.

My eyes fluttered shut. There was blackness pressing in, and I couldn't tell if I was still somehow seeing more Araneviro or if I was fading like the other companions did.

Either way, I was eager to welcome death, as I was hoping it would bring relief. |


End file.
